Powerball: Can You Improve Your Odds?

Every day, we secure insurance for Georgia homeowners and metro Atlanta businesses that will protect their financial interests when life’s odds are NOT in their favor. But if there’s anything we could do to make the POWERBALL odds MORE in your favor, we’d do it! (or at least share it!)

Since we’re not Powerball experts (just future winners *crossing fingers*), however, we wanted to share the thoughts of The Associated Press here:

CAN YOU IMPROVE YOUR ODDS?

Ticket holders have a 1 in 292.2 million chance of winning the world record $1.3 billion Powerball jackpot on Wednesday night.

To put that in perspective, the odds of hitting the jackpot are about the same as your odds of flipping a quarter and getting heads 28 times in a row, said Jeffrey Miecznikowski, associate professor of biostatistics at the University at Buffalo.

“The probability is so small, dare say impossible,” Miecznikowski said. “It’s like trying to count electrons or drops of water in the ocean or grains of sand in the world. We just can’t imagine these types of things.”

But are there ways to increase your odds, like picking the most popular numbers historically drawn?

Roughly 95 percent of Powerball tickets are computer-generated quick picks, so people’s favorite numbers aren’t really a factor. Officials don’t track which numbers are most popular because so many are randomly generated.

Your odds do increase with additional tickets, but it’s important to keep in mind how small they are to begin with. If you have a 1 in 292.2 million chance of winning with one ticket, you have 10 times the odds if you buy 10 tickets. Yet the probability is still incredibly small.

“The odds are so astronomically small that even 100 times that number is exceedingly unlikely to win,” said Scott A. Norris, an assistant professor of mathematics at Southern Methodist University. “It’s probably still not going to happen if you buy a hundred tickets or a thousand tickets or even a million tickets.”

Some people feel that pooling their money with co-workers will improve their chance of winning — but, again, with such tiny odds, adding 50 or 100 chances doesn’t give you a leg up. And if your group is lucky, lottery officials recommend preventing hard feelings by putting in writing how you plan to split the prize, since it’s easy for misunderstandings to crop up when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.

No one has won the Powerball jackpot since early November, which is why the prize has grown so large. The bigger prize entices more people to buy tickets, and that drives up the jackpot. The increased ticket sales also make it more likely there will be a winner, simply because all those extra tickets mean more number combinations are covered.

Texas Lottery executive director Gary Grief said 75 percent of all the possible combinations were purchased before Saturday’s drawing, and he expects that enough tickets will be sold to cover about 80 percent by Wednesday. About 95 percent of Powerball tickets have computer-generated numbers.

There is one way in improve your tiny odds. Norris said your odds of winning are a bit better if you let the computer pick rather than choosing yourself. That’s because when people use birthdates or other favorite figures, they generally choose numbers 31 or below. That ignores the fact that there are 69 numbered balls.

— The Associated Press

If you can’t win the Powerball, you can still “win” a ridiculously good-looking (but even better & hard working) insurance agent! Request a quote here on our website, or call 877.269.6509!